Because currently manufactured facsimile systems use relatively low cost signal processing components that are available from a wide variety of chip suppliers, it has been possible to keep the price of individual transceiver units reasonably low, so that the facsimile equipment market presently enjoys mass appeal. One of the major components that governs the cost of the system is the compression unit through which signals (output from an optical scanner), representative of the contents of a document, are compressed and formatted for transmission to a remote terminal unit. Such compression units customarily use some form of one or two-dimensional Huffman encoding mechanism that has been optimized to compress the text-representative data `across the page` and typically operate at a signal processing rate of up to five megabits per second, and more commonly on the order of one to two megabits per second. As a result, conventional, mass market facsimile systems, regardless of the input data rate, are capable of achieving a document processing rate of only about one page per minute. In this regard, even though a high data rate (e.g. 10-12 Mb/s) optical scanner may be used to convert the printed text to digital data, because of the slow processing speed of the compression chip, it is necessary to buffer the input data until it can be accessed at the slower rate of the compression mechanism, thus increasing system cost without an improvement in document processing speed.